I joined straight out of high school. I was seventeen. My first experience with sexual harassment was with my recruiter. He was married and his wife was pregnant, and he used to make it a requirement for me to go with him and talk to other soldiers about joining the army in order to reel them in. One night he got drunk, and he had to stay at a hotel because his wife was mad at him. I drove him to the hotel and then he came on to me; I was able to weasel my way out of it and get out. That was my first brush with just the military and sexual harassment.
When I was in basic training, we heard stories of drill sergeants sleeping with trainees. When I deployed I worked in a clinic. I was a combat medic and had this interest in looking at gruesome things. I asked one of the surgeons there if there was a way I could go to the operating room and watch a case. He said, “OK,” and the next day he asked if I wanted to start working there.
I agreed and started the next day at seven in the morning, and through that whole deployment, I was harassed like every single day. I dreaded every day I went to work because this surgeon would catch me alone in a hallway and push himself against me with his hands behind his back. It’s extremely difficult to do your job proficiently, efficiently, and correctly when you have to look out for one of your own supervisors.
So basically what he was practicing was quid quo pro, you know, “I transferred you to the operating room, so therefore, you need to give me something back.” This person was in an extremely important position and he had transferred me over. All I kept thinking was, “If I speak out, it’s gonna be my word against him, and I’m just a specialist, so who are they gonna believe? Are they gonna get rid of the guy that’s making all the decisions and saving lives or me, the disposable specialist?” It never got to a physical point because he knew exactly what he was doing, and I never reported it because I knew the command wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s not easy to speak up—you’re looked at as a snitch for turning around and talking about your brothers and sisters and comrades that you’re working with day in and day out.
Some people point out that we do sexual harassment training. We do consideration-of-others training, but the type of training that goes on is check-the-box training. Which usually consists of an NCO in the front of a room giving a PowerPoint presentation and then we’re done, everybody goes home.
It’s really hard for me to sit here and kind of tell you all this because I joined trying to be patriotic. I joined to try to do something for my country, and the last thing I would’ve imagined would have been joining an organization where I would be harassed this way by my own peers, by my own comrades.